NEVER BE
I’ll never be the seedling
on the telephone
wire that draws sustenance
from nowhere, though daily
I’m shimmied
by the murmur of voices.
I’ll never be the sky insinuating
itself between
each wing in the murder
of crows, though I can let it
choreograph my mood.
I’ll never be the housefly
buzzing in the key
of F, but I can hum
in harmony. I’ll never be
the low-hanging
cloud above the lake,
but I know
that it’s really just the way
that something as heavy
as the lake
is learning how to fly.
UNSCRIPTED
How delicious
to be path averse,
to accept the undergrowth’s
thorned invitation.
You are both thunder
& molasses,
so when you’re gone,
the day is a bee
with a single wing
trying to find the air
in endless figure-eights.
Keep the map
in your pocket,
because what good luck
to have your route be
permanently unscripted.
Your voice smells like
almonds, a bowl of bruised
cherries, & even before
we touch I know
you’ll taste nocturnal.
MURALS
Let us paint murals across
the buildings—brick, window,
door, & all—murals
of the fields & sky
they obstruct, so that you look
at an edifice but see
everything but edifice.
Let’s let asters & cosmos,
bergamot & columbine
reclaim the bricks’ space
so that even the bricks
wondered what they
themselves were. How about
murals of high, helixing
grasses on fences so it looks
like you could wade
from a field into yet more
field. Let’s make it so
you have to know just
which knot of wood
to stick your key into
in order to open the door
to your house.
Would it not just feel right
to paint SUVs & trucks
with the trunks of trees
so that a highway looks
like a forest in motion?
& if we could paint
over car exhaust & contrails
all the better to turn
those toxic shreds
back into blue.
Let us not hesitate
before V616 Monoerotis,
the closest black hole
to earth, which has no chance
of destroying us before we
get down to that business
ourselves. Let us practice
disappearing our bricks,
our signs, our wheels,
our smoking barrels,
so that we may feel
what it’s like just before
our turn has come,
so we may feel our murals
crumble, & imagine
the painted sky
turning back into sky.
Glint Literary Journal 